


Hauntings of the Future

by geniewithwifi



Series: Hero Quintessence [8]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst, Bratva, Deals a little with Havenrock, F/M, Lots of Angst, Mentions of Suicide, attempted suicide, bratva!Oliver, season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 20:56:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8300720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geniewithwifi/pseuds/geniewithwifi
Summary: Oliver's in the darkest place he has ever been in the past five years, wracked with guilt after his ascension to Captain. However someone arrives from the future to stop him from making the biggest mistake of his life.Time Travel & Bratva.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [writewithurheart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/writewithurheart/gifts).



> First off, this is a gift fic for my BFF and beta @writewithurheart. It was her birthday yesterday and she requested a time travel AU. So this is what she gets. This isn't fluffy, not at all. But as I was thinking about it, I was like, what if Felicity visited Oliver during his time in Russia? And I went from there. 
> 
> This technically fits into my Hero Quintessence series because it's about Oliver an his head space, and it deals with stuff from season 5, but that's more Felicity. And since Oliver's in the bratva, it's just season 5 all around. 
> 
> Trigger warnings for suicide. Mentions of Suicide and attempted. Please read responsibly. 
> 
> I suggest reading this twice to get the full impact of this drabble.

Oliver stared at the gun resting in his lap. The glock was a dull matte, the barrel having small flecks of powder, invisible to the naked eye, but felt as a gritty sand, when his fingers rubbed over it. 

One knuckle was busted, cut badly with blood dripping down a finger. Faint bruises could be seen underneath the blood, as well as full fledged on the other hand. Oliver flexed his hand, hissing when sparks of pain registered shot to his head. 

He placed the gun on the night table of the dingy condo he was currently residing in. A one room apartment, with a closet he called a bathroom in the corner. Cracks were woven throughout the ceiling, dust and asbestos raining down when the upstairs residents were too vigorous with their daily sexual activities. The one window in the room was stuck open a crack, letting in the cold, brisk wind, the last of winter. 

He stood up from the bed, pacing over to the window, stopping to stare out at the city, before trailing back over to the night table, handling the gun, staring at it.  Then he put it down abruptly, storming to the window again, losing himself in the bustling people below, watching as they went on with their lives while he was encaged in his own mind.   

Oliver glanced over his shoulder, eyeing the glock. He took one step towards it, then turned back, leaning his forehead against the cool glass. The breeze chilled him, causing goosebumps to erupt on his bare chest. The moonlight brightened his scars, the marks of evil littering his torso, a patchwork of sins and vices. Evidence of the cruelty of humans. 

Still fresh were the recent scars, a couple of scabs on his arms. Stitches covered a round hole in his left shoulder, angry red. The most noticeable feature out of the patterns was a dark, black star, tinged with scarlet to indicate it’s newness, sore to the touch. 

A symbol. 

A warrior’s stripes, though he fought no battles. In battle there was honor, courage. Oliver was not beholden to such a standard. What he did, it was an injustice to hint at any type of honor. To him, the only word was slaughter. Innocent and guilty blood poured together, mixing in the same vessel, and staining his hands. Brothers died tonight, his brothers, and yet he felt nothing. 

It was called the Brotherhood, yet they were not family. Each and everyone was inconsequential, expendable, unattached to each other. The greatest facade; a brotherhood where no one was really brothers. Where there was no loss, because they were machines, no longer human. 

Pull the trigger, another enemy dead. 

The only person to trust, is yourself. 

He pushed off the window, trudging to the bathroom. He turned the tap, letting the cold water rush out. Cupping the stream, he splashed his face, letting the water drip down his cheeks, pooling off his chin. 

Viciously, he started scrubbing, using the lye bar of soap to clean his stained hands. The soap stung the cuts but Oliver was past feeling. Past caring. 

He had kept his promise, but destroyed his soul in the process. He wasn’t supposed to feel anymore, was supposed to be a machine. His emotions to be swept away by the blood on his hands, in his heart, running through his conscience. The whips, the knives, the bullets were to beat it out of him. 

Instead of abandoning his humanity like they wanted him to, which logic begged him to do, he kept it. He put it in a box, far away in the back of his mind so he could focus, singling down on the one ultimate goal. 

After what he had done there this day, he wished he didn’t have the box. He wished that he had thrown it away, gotten rid of it a long time ago. It poisoned his mind, slowed his actions. 

Tormented him in the quiet. 

For so long the box had been neglected, in the back of his mind, a timid thing that wasn’t a nuisance. He’d stopped acknowledging its existence in the face of his trials. It had become an encumbrance. In the absence, though, the cube had changed, weakened. Now, when the deeds were done and inaction let the wounds fester, the container broke, letting out everything he had shoved in there. Pain, guilt, sadness. Pandora had opened the box and the agony was crushing. 

No amount of scrubbing would make it go away. 

Shutting off the water, he walked back over the the night table, picking up the gun. He stared at it, clutching it like a lifeline, juxtaposed by the distance he held it at. 

Slowly, he sat down on the bed. Water wouldn’t make the blood go away. 

But a bullet would do quite nicely. 

He’d had many guns held to his head before; the side, the forehead, even the back of his neck. He’d held one to his own jaw once, prepared to sacrifice himself. 

This time he placed the cold, hard barrel in his mouth. He tasted the tang of metal, the reality of what he was about to do crashing about his ears. 

_ Survive,  _ a voice whispered. His father. He had made a promise, one he had yet to fulfill. He wasn’t ready yet. He didn’t think he would ever be ready. What was home, but a weight, dragging one down? He couldn’t go home. He couldn’t look at his mother and still be that little boy that followed her around everywhere. He couldn’t hug his sister and be the big brother that always protected her. He couldn’t go home and be the person who he once was because that person had died, a thousand times over. 

Oliver had failed in his promise. He hadn’t survived. His father’s son was dead. 

He crooked his finger around the trigger, felt the barrel settle against the roof of his mouth. He closed his eyes and--

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” 

Years of honed reflexes had him whipping the gun away from his head, towards the offending intruder. One he hadn’t heard enter his apartment, had no inkling that they were even there. How did they enter without him knowing? He knew the second the rats in the wall left their nest to hunt for food on his counter, but a person had trespassed into a Bratva captain’s abode and he hadn’t been wiser.? 

His vision settled on the burglar, ready to blast their brains out. He started when he realized that it was a  _ woman.  _

Averaged height, not exceptionally short nor tall, yet she barely reached past his shoulder. Waves of blonde hair flowed down her back, the roots a dark brown. She wore a tan trench coat, one that was almost a flounced skirt, which reached down to high heeled boots. Her lips were painted a dark pink, hinting on red. Dark framed glasses perched on her nose with crystal blue eyes luminous behind the lenses. 

What stunned him most of all was that he recognized her. 

“You.”

It was the same girl he had saw back in Starling, the one in the CEO’s office. The same girl that had called him cute. But what was she doing  _ here?  _

“Yes, me. I mean, who else were you expecting? Not that you couldn’t be expecting someone that wasn’t me, but I’d be the most obvious choice, because well… wait. How do you know who I am? And will you lower that? It makes me nervous when you’re pointing it at me.”

Oliver stared, baffled and confused by this woman who stood in his room, babbling about nothing, while he had a gun trained on her. 

Needless to say, he didn’t lower the gun. 

“What are you doing here?” he said, ignoring her question. 

She fidgeted, running her hand through her hair, her focus on the gun. Finally, probably realizing that he wasn’t going to put it down, she sighed, smiling sadly. 

“I’m here to prevent you from doing what you were about to do.” 

She stepped towards him, hesitantly. He watched her, tense, his hand gripping the gun, but he allowed her approach. Carefully, she reached up and touched the weapon, bringing it down to his hip. He let her, fingers cramping from how tight he held that position. 

While his mind screamed at him, sending off warnings of distrust and accusations, he ignored all that. His every instinct told him to shoot her. His heart though, told him that she was trustworthy, not a threat. A small piece of that box letting him know that it was alright. When he’d joined the Bratva, he’d gladly put that part in the container, grateful it was out of sight. Now it whispered in his head that he wasn’t in any danger, that he could trust her. 

There was just something about her. 

She sat on the bed, slowly, watching him. The movements she made had him thinking of someone approaching a wild beast. Carefully calculated moves, always non-threatening. Like she was going to great lengths to not set him off. 

Like he was a time bomb. 

“Come sit.” The woman patted the bed beside her. 

Despite wanting to listen to her, he just stood, gun at his side. She was still an unknown.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?  _ What do you want with me? _ “ His voice grew harder with every question he shot her way. She took it, unflinchingly. 

“You can’t scare me, Oliver.” 

“How do you know my name?”

“You ask a lot of questions, you know that? And most of them I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?” 

“‘Bad things happen when you mess with Time’”. It sounded like a quote. Then he realized what she just said. 

“Time? You’re, what? Like a time traveler?” How was this possible? He’d seen a lot, especially with Constantine and the whole island experience. Mirakuru men he could understand. But time travel? It was a lot to take it. 

She smiled, a happier smile than the one before. It actually reached her eyes, but disappeared just as quickly. 

“Yes. Which is why I can’t tell you much. I can’t tell you my name, nor when you’ll see me next. But I  _ can  _ tell you the reason I’m here.”

“Why?” He was in no mood for games. 

She was silent. His head cocked, she stared at him. He brow furrowed. A strange feeling came that he was answering her questions unknowingly. He waited, watching her expression change from curious, to assessing, to a calculating frown. 

She stood up, getting in his personal space. He could feel the heat coming off her, mere inches from his bare torso. If he took a deep enough breath, the fibers of her coat would touch his skin. A part of him wanted to step forward and bask in her touch, knowing that it would anchor him. But the more dominant part stubbornly protested, indicating that  _ his  _ touch to  _ her  _ was catastrophic. He refused to let that happen.

She, on the other hand, ignored his inner debate. Her hand came up, tangling in his long hair, brushing it back from his face. Why he let her do it was a mystery he couldn’t answer. 

So quiet he could barely hear she whispered, “Suicide is not the answer.” 

Her palm grazed his cheek, his stubble scraping her hand. He jerked slightly, unused to human contact with any measure of kindness. He hadn’t has someone that cared enough for him to touch him in such a way since Sara--

He flinched at her name, towards the stranger’s hand rather than away from it. A small sense of comfort radiated from their connection, from her eyes. As desperately as he wanted to look away, to remove his darkness from the woman’s apparent light, he was frozen, unable to move. 

Finally, he found his voice. “It’s what I deserve.” 

“No, no it’s not. It’s  _ not,  _ Oliver. You don’t deserve that. You deserve so much more than a death here.”

“There’s nothing left to live for.”

“Oh, but there is! There is so much to live for, Oliver. You just can’t see it yet. Where I am from, “ she paused, shaking her head in awe, “I am so proud of you. You just have to get through this first.”

“You don’t know what I’ve done!”

“Oliver…” 

“No. You don’t. You don’t know me. If you did you wouldn’t be looking at me like that. I deserve this. I’m a monster.”

“You’re not. You’re really not.”

His mouth tightened into a line. She had come from the future to prevent this from happening. This woman believed in him enough to return to the past to save him. Which meant she didn’t really know him, didn’t know how black with blood his soul ran. She didn’t know the levels of hell he had stooped to. Which meant he’d have to tell her, in order to convince her to leave. 

“I’ve killed people. Mercilessly. For a price. For revenge. Innocents have died by my hand, directly or indirectly. Hundreds are dead because of me. I deserve this.” Once again he put the gun to his mouth. 

“I’ve killed thousands. ”

He reared back, stunned by this knowledge. The person in front of him was so pure, so radiant that just the thought of her being… tainted was unfathomable. Incomprehensible. She deserved so much more than him. 

“Do I deserve death? Do I deserve to drown in my own blood?”

“No.” He choked. Of course not. She was an angel in heels. 

“Because there was a time I thought I should. I was so wracked with guilt, I was in so deep, I almost did. I almost took my own life.”

She stopped, her eyes pleading with him, begging him to understand. 

“I know you’re going through hell. I know how it feels. The pain gets so bad that you just want to it end, to scrub the blood off your hands and bite a bullet. I made a mistake and it cost thousands of people their lives. And the guilt-- I didn’t take it well. I hid from it, pretended that it didn’t exist. It ate me up inside. If it wasn’t for you, and this experience right here, right now, I’d be lying on the floor in the loft, surrounded by blood and wine. You saved me Oliver, and now it’s my turn to save you.” 

He couldn’t help the disbelieving laugh from barking out. 

“I  _ saved  _ you? Are you mad? I don’t  _ save  _ anyone. I lose people. I hurt people. Every single person I have ever cared enough about in the last five years has either tortured me or died! And you’re telling me that I  _ saved  _ you? I can’t. That’s my cross. I only bring darkness into people’s lives. And I don’t know what kind of person you think i am, but I swear to you, I am not a hero.”  

“And,” he added as an afterthought, “I don’t need saving.” He turned away from her, going to stand in front of the window again. Hopefully she would take the hint and leave him the hell alone. 

“I think the gun in the mouth says otherwise. We’re are our own worst enemy, detrimental to our own desires by listening to the demon inside.”

He could feel her approach, resting a hand on his shoulder blade. She traced the cuts on the back, slowly, almost reverently. 

“You’re not alone, Oliver. Trust me.”

He did. For the strangest reason, despite the circumstances, he did. 

“There is so much more ahead of you. I know that it seems dark now, and I won’t promise you that it’ll get better right away, because it doesn’t. But, Oliver, you’re so strong. You’re the strongest person I know. You can get through this. “

He turned back around. “How?” 

Her lips, those bright red lips twisted ruefully. She looked around, searching for something. Her eyes alighted on something on his night table, and she reached for it. 

“I can’t believe I’m about to say this, considering everything I know about this timeline. About you and how you carry guilt like a comfort blanket. But this,” and she brandished his father’s notebook, the light brown names barely visible, “is your way back. You need to go home, Oliver.”

“No.” His reply was immediate. There was no way he was going back. He  _ couldn’t.  _

“Yes.” She was fierce, he would give her credit. This mystery woman in front of him refused to back down. “You’re ready, Oliver. “

“I’m not.”

She gripped his hand.

“You know that part of you, the part that feels this guilt? That’s your lifeline, the string that ties you back to...to Starling. Focus on that. Just beyond that is the calm.”

“What calm?” What was she talking about. But she ignored him.  

“You can survive this and make it home.” He wondered how in the hell she knew the words his father told him. “It’s time, Oliver. You’ve been here long enough.”

“But-”

“Listen to me.” She glanced over his shoulder, and her expression tightened. “I’m running out of time. I have to go back. Everything that you’ve experienced here, it’s made you into the man who saved my life. You’re strong, you’re gonna get through this. Please.” 

The woman stepped further away, backing towards the place she had first appeared. 

“No, wait,” he begged. Just being in her presence soothed the ache in his chest, that beast that mocked him, that hated the person in the mirror. The beast that had controlled the gun and placed it in his mouth. 

“ _ Go home.  _ You wanna meet me? Then honor your father’s last wishes. Right his wrongs. Your city needs saving and only you can do it.”

“Please,” he whispered, holding on to her hand tightly, “tell me who you are to me?”

“I can’t.” She looked about ready to cry. “I’m sorry. I--- Barry said that I can’t, you knowing would change everything and-- I just can’t. There are rules.” 

“A name-- any name. Please.” 

As he said the words, he felt something cold against his fingers. Looking down he realized that he was grasping her left hand, a wedding ring gracing the fourth finger. Not knowing what to make of that, he looked back at her. 

She bit her lip, then gave him a word that gave him hope, something to live for. 

The second he let go of her hand she vanished, slipping through space. He thought for a second that maybe he had imagined her. Perhaps he was already dead and she was the one to greet him in whatever came after that life. 

However, she left something behind. In her haste to disappear, his tight grip had pulled her ring off, the simple band small in in his palm. 

He curled his fingers over it when he heard someone banging on his door. His right hand came up, only just realizing that he still held the glock. 

“ _ Да! _ ?” (Yes!?)

“Ты нужен, капитан” (You’re needed, Captain)

“Понял. Оставлять.” (Understood. Now leave)

He once again looked at the ring, noticing a tiny inscription. Turning on the lamp, he look a closer look. 

_ You are my always ~Oliver _

She was his. 

His wife. 

A startling thought hit him. It wasn’t Laurel. 

All this time he’d hung onto the picture of her, the girlfriend he thought he loved. The guiding beacon back home. 

As he thought about it, he realized that that notion was no longer true. If it had been, he wouldn’t have put the gun in his mouth in the first place. Just the thought of her would’ve been enough. 

It wasn’t enough. Laurel wasn’t enough. 

Although, this girl, the woman who would apparently become his wife, she needed him. She needed him to survive this, to carry on, to have this experience so that he could help her when the time came. 

She was enough. 

Oliver tucked the ring into his pocket, making a note to hang onto it until the time was right. He felt a bit guilty at accidentally stealing it from her, but now it was his beacon home. 

Home. 

He could just imagine actually seeing his mom, hugging his sister. His grown up sister. Reminiscing with Tommy, making amends with Laurel, and her. The mysterious woman. For the first time, in a long time, he felt buoyed up. 

He felt ready.

Ready to take on the task his father set before him. With his chosen weapon, one that required strength, discipline, and a calmness inside. 

The calmness behind the guilt. The line tethering him to what was left of his soul. Somehow she knew that he would need it. 

He was done with guns. 

Guns could kill a lot of people in seconds, uncaring, and unfeeling machines, intending to hurt innocents as well as enemies. A bow and arrow on the other hand...

Oliver opened the drawer of the nightstand, placing the glock inside. He slammed the drawer shut, then knelt next to the bed, reaching under the blanket hanging off the edge. 

He pulled out an army trunk with chinese lettering.  Moving around the cloth, he revealed his gift from Anatoly, the day he had officially joined the Bratva. 

A beautiful recurve bow, tightened to perfection. One he had never used, never had the desire to use. He grabbed his quiver, slinging it over his back. He grabbed the notebook from where the woman had dropped it, placing it inside next to a bag of island herbs. He slid the trunk back under after locking it up. 

Standing up, he felt more like himself. Like the man who would bring justice back to his city. He had hope, thanks to one single, solitary word, the word last spoken by his saving angel. 

_ Happiness.  _

**Author's Note:**

> Part 2 of Forward and Backwards is UP! It's called Blood and Wine


End file.
